Studying Learning Using Video Games

A subtheme in this blog has been the influence of video game play on people’s behavior. There is an ongoing debate about both the potential negative impact of playing games (such as increases in aggression or lower grades) as well as positive influences (like an increase in prosocial behavior after playing games with positive messages and an increase in speed of decision making).

Video games themselves can also be a great testing ground for theories of learning. That was the approach taken in a fascinating paper in the February, 2014 issue of Psychological Science by Tom Stafford and Michael Dewar.

They were interested in testing a fascinating theory about learning new skills. The idea is that any time you are learning something new, there is a tradeoff between exploiting past knowledge and exploring new strategies. The proposal was that people who succeed best in learning new skills start by exploring a range of strategies. This exploration may cause them to do well when they hit on a potentially good strategy and to do poorly when they try something that does not work well. Then, when people find a good strategy, they should exploit it and keep improving their skill. Those who settle on a strategy too quickly (and so they start exploiting early) may end up picking one that is far from optimal, and so they will do more poorly in the long run.

They worked with a game designer to create an on-line game called Axon. The game involves making simple selections of targets on a screen. Some of the dots are colored, and the colored dots have different influences. Some colors are better to hit than others. So, there is some strategy, but the strategies are not complex and are mostly focused on which color dots should be selected.

During the data collection period, the game was played over 3.5 million times by over 850,000 players. Most of the analyses were done on the 45,672 individuals who played the game 10 or more times.

Before addressing the key experimental question, it was important for the researchers to make sure that the data gave sensible results. So, they started by verifying that two classic phenomena from learning studies occurred in this data set. The first was the observation that performance improves with practice. Looking at those people who played at least 10 games, it was clear that the more games people played, the better they got.

Second, it is well known that when people space their practice out over time, their performance is better than when it is concentrated together. There are several reasons for the improvement for practice that is spaced out over time. One is that spaced practice allows information being learned to become associated with many different contexts. The second is that sleep improves skilled performance, and the more times people play and the more time that elapses between attempts, the more likely that people will sleep between attempts at the game.

Consistent with the prior work on this topic, people who concentrated their game play together did worse at the game than those who spread their play out over time.

Because the game yields sensible data, the researchers could look at the more complex question relating early strategies to later performance. The researchers looked at the degree of variability in the scores over the first five games people played. The more variable the scores, the more strategies people were likely to have tried early on. They looked at how this variability was related to the high score people achieved on the next five games they played.

The more variable people’s scores in the first five games, the higher their best score tended to be in the next five games. That is, exploring a range of initial strategies allowed participants to do better than selecting a single strategy early on and sticking with it.

There are two interesting things about this project.

First, it is a great example of using the internet to look at learning in a large number of people. Most research studies done at universities involve a small number of participants who perform a small number of trials on a task. This game is still fairly simple, but it allowed a large number of people to play it.

Second, these findings suggest that it is valuable to try a number of different strategies in any task before settling on one. People who did this naturally in the game were more successful than those who did not. An interesting follow up study would explore whether people who are instructed to try different strategies also do better than those who are instructed to select a strategy and stick with it. That would disentangle whether these results reflect that people who are better at video games are those who also try more strategies, or whether anyone can improve by trying more strategies.

This is actually one of the most common practices I use when I try to master a game. Many of us gamers have a diverse cast of genres we choose to play, which can include RPG, fighting games, or adventure games. No matter what genre I play, I believe in practice makes perfect. For example, I pove fighting games. Fifhting games are a complex to a beginner, and learning to win is different from having fun. Gaming has evolved into a challenging and productive task, where reward is the goal. In fighting games, winning is the goal. Is not in the interest of a rookie to play a fighting game and lose, because it defeats the purpose of having fun -- unless is enjoyed exclusively for that. That's why fighting games, at least in this generation, has trouble appealing to non-traditional and casual gamers. Accessibility is a big factor in determinimg if one enjoys a certain type of fighter, and if you don't like a certain thing, chances are you'll ignore it. No matter how many genres out there, all games are competiting towards one another.

I truly believe practice makes perfect. I grew up with the greatest generation in gaming, which was the 90's. The industry has gone a long way from two buttons. Nowadays games require quick thinking, quick decision making, and quick intuition. The beauty of video games is the control we gamers have. I believe learning works because we have control over a world where error is less severe and improvement is highly encouraged. And since video games are filled with classical behavioral reward and punishment systems, that motivational drive is enough to keep moving forward until you finally beat it or collect every little thing. The freedom is too much to enjoy without feeling any anger or discouragement, even though games can have a significant emotional toll on us, which can have.

That is the next step. Video games are solely used for entertainment, and is still controversial how much is too much, even though is constitutional. But I think if we can find a simulated experience where we can feel comfortable making choices without discomfort or social disapproval, learning can become a habit as opposed to a behavioral, cognitive, observational, or memory system. And it can: some military personnel use flight simulated games to prepare potential pilots. I do believe behavioral learning is important, as well as imitation. But that next step is cognition. That's the level of all levels. And who knows, maybe the hundreds of billions of people in the world can do a Shoryuken(Street Fighter reference), and hopefully deal with difficult decisions or experiences(cognition can help deal with stress). Not to mention how neuroscientists can see the benefits.